The Blog

One avenue of intimacy with our Lord is seeking a deeper understanding of our own hearts and how we can better offer them to His love—an idea that Tanner Kalina thoroughly adventures through in his new book, All Your Heart, available July 20 from Ascension Press.

If someone had told my younger self that my eleventh-grade English class could be redeemed by uncovering hidden themes of Catholicism and Truth in secular novels, I probably would have laughed. Public school teachers rarely took that leap. But the Ignatius Critical Edition of The Great Gatsby does exactly that.

This past Sunday, on the Feast of Corpus Christi, our deacon concluded his homily with a simple enough lesson: “Love isn’t love until you give it away.” I spent the rest of my day trying to figure out why this line sounded so familiar. It had moved me deeply—I would go so far as to say that it galvanized me in the face of both everyday discontents and deeper wounds that I’d brought to the Lord that morning. Eventually, Google informed me that it comes most directly from the reprise of “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” from The Sound of Music, a film I have a fondness for but don’t know by heart.

For those seeking a theological story of truth, love, and faith—but aren’t quite ready to sit down with St. Augustine’s Confessions—Thomas Curry’s Miss Sally’s Son (Ignatius Press) is a compelling alternative.

Curry himself describes the novel as a way to reach audiences who might otherwise not be open to reading about the Catholic faith, writing that his “goal in writing has always been evangelization, believing that fiction speaks to a different ear than serious theology.”

A record number of over 10,000 faithful are registered to participate in this tradition of honoring Christ and Our Lady with a 22-mile pilgrimage from the National Shrine of St. Joseph in De Pere, WI, to the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion. The Shrine is the only approved Marian apparition site in the United States. We wrote about the apparition’s seer Adele Brice a few months back on this blog—her cause for canonization was recently opened by the Most Reverend David L. Ricken, Bishop of Green Bay. Servant of God Adele Brice devoted her life to traveling on foot as far as fifty miles through the Wisconsin wilderness to catechize families and children regardless of the weather, heeding the instructions to evangelize given to her by Our Lady of Champion.